in the day, and I wanted to take the traps down if they had not produced anything. I wanted to wake in the morning, pack my gear, and set out. I didn’t want to worry about going to get the traps before I left.
I got to where I had set up the rat traps and they were empty, so I dismantled them and put them in my cargo pocket. When I got to the conibear trap, I was glad to see that I had trapped a rather large groundhog. A conibear trap breaks an animal’s neck when it is set off, so the groundhog was dead when I got to it. I had to be careful when I set these things up because a dog can easily be killed if it inadvertently sets off a conibear trap.
I again gave thanks and cleaned the groundhog, buried the guts and fur, and took it back to the cave where I roasted it. I cooked it longer than I should have so that it would dry out more. I could eat it over the next couple of days as either jerky or I could add it to water and make a quick stew. I put the groundhog meat it the bag that had held the oats and stored it in my ruck.
By the time this was all done, it was getting dark in the cave. The majority of my gear was packed, my water containers were full, and I now had some food to last me for a few days at least.
I took out my head lamp and maps. I knew where Norman and Amanda’s house was, and by using the topography, I had a pretty good idea of where I was now. Using the distance meter on the map, I guessed that I had maybe two more weeks of travel before I got home, maybe three if the terrain got worse.
I lay awake for several hours when I finally decided to walk out to the mouth of the cave. It was a clear, cool night, and the stars were bright and lit up the sky. I sat there and watched the sky move, thinking about how beautiful this was. I thought about how much of a shame it was that I had to experience it when the world was falling apart. It got me thinking about how far reaching this thing was. Was it just the United States, or had this reached as far south as Mexico, and as far north as Canada? Was this a strike from an enemy country, and if so, had we retaliated? These were questions that I would probably never know but were questions that I’m sure were running through more minds than just mine.
I eventually got tired enough to go back into the cave and try to sleep. I lay down against my ruck and was asleep faster than I had expected.
I woke up the next morning, feeling refreshed. I packed up the rest of my gear, slung my ruck and AR, and set out.
I traveled the whole day, never experiencing anything out of the ordinary. I tried hard to avoid towns or heavily populated areas, choosing to stay as much in the woods as I could. Sometimes, as I crossed roadways, I could see cars littering the roads.
About the middle of the second day after I left the cave, I heard a girl screaming. Not the type of scream like if she saw a mouse but a true honest-to-God scream like she was in fear for her life.
I moved in the general direction of the scream and came to a small clearing. It looked like a power line with a small tool-type shed in the middle of it. There were two men in front of the shed, holding down a pretty brunette girl that looked to be in her late teens. The men were rough-looking. They both had shaved heads, wore jeans, boots, and T-shirts. Guy one was bigger, maybe weighing in at 235, while guy two was maybe 185. They both looked to be in their late twenties, early thirties. There were two rifles lying on the ground beside where they were attacking the girl. They looked like Mini 14s that had been converted to polymer stocks.
The girl was also in jeans, boots, and a flannel shirt. She was screaming and fighting with all she could as she was being held down. Guy number two fought just as hard as he pulled down her pants. There was no way that I could let this go.
I dropped my ruck, and unholstered my 1911. I left the AR with my ruck, using some brush to conceal its location the best that I could.
I moved slowly and steadily toward the shed, coming up on the back side of it. The rape was taking place in the front. I moved around the side of the shed, coming up to the corner behind guy number two. I peeked around the corner and saw that the girl was still fighting, temporarily able to hold them off. I decided to attack and move forward. Both men were so engrossed in assaulting this girl that neither noticed me. I grabbed guy number two around the neck and performed a contact shot to the base of his head, below his right ear. Brain and blood blew out of a hole that appeared near the temple behind his left eye. As he slumped to the ground, my front sight found guy number one.
Guy number one was so busy watching the fear and agony on the girl’s face that it took him a second or two to figure out what was going on. It was the few seconds that I needed to get the drop on him. I pulled the trigger. Guy number one’s head snapped back as the .45 round hit him at the bridge of his nose. The bullet entered the medulla oblongata, shutting off any motor function in his body. He dropped straight to the ground. The fight was over.
The echo of the gunshots vibrated through the area, causing birds to bolt from their perches, and the insects to quiet down. All that could be heard was the echo and the young girl’s hysterics.
The girl was frantically pulling up her pants, trying to back away from me.
“Sweetheart, it’s okay, I’m not gonna hurt you.” I put my 1911 back in its holster, putting my hands up, palms forward, trying to show her that I didn’t want to hurt her.
“What’s your name? Honest, sweetheart, I’m not with these guys. I don’t want to hurt you.” Buy this time, she was dressed again, but she was still panicked, which was understandable. She turned from me, and ran up the power line, disappearing into the woods about fifty yards from the shed. I decided not to follow her.
I went back to where I had dropped my gear and retrieved my stuff. I then went back to the two dead guys and took the time to check and see if they had anything I needed or if there was anything to give me an idea of who they were. They had no identification on them and nothing really worth taking except for their ammo. The Mini-14 used the .223 round so I could use that. They each had a magazine in their weapons and carried a second magazine in a pocket. That gave me four thirty-round magazines, or 120 rounds. I couldn’t use the magazines in my AR, so I emptied the rounds into a sock and put them into my ruck.
I couldn’t leave these guys out in the open, so I drug them behind the shed, into the wood line, using brush, leaves, and rotted, fallen trees to cover up their corpses. Once I had cleaned up the area to hide what had happened, I spent several minutes just listening. I wanted to see if anybody came to investigate the gunshots or if anybody came looking for the two guys I had just killed. Once I was sure neither of those things were going to happen, I got my gear back on and set out.
I got to where the girl had disappeared into the woods. There was a path there that went in a general northwest direction, which was the direction that I was going. I moved along the path for about a hundred yards when I heard a branch snap behind me. I dropped to a knee and turned around. I immediately heard a twig snap behind me again. This time, when I turned to check my six, all I saw was the butt of a shotgun as it struck me in the face. My world went dark.
6
Charles Guntrom was a big man. He stood well over six feet tall and weighed nearly two hundred and fifty pounds but carrying the piece of shit that had tried to rape his daughter back to his barn was tough. Maybe he wasn’t as young as he used to be or as young as he thought he was. The stranger wasn’t a big guy, but he was stocky. He was about five foot ten and weighed maybe two hundred and fifty pounds.
Charles had lived on this farm his entire life. He had inherited it from his father, who got it from his father before him. His oldest son, Charlie Junior, had gone to Penn State University and majored in agriculture so he could take over the farm someday. That was until the blackout. Now he
